Semantic Syntax
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Generative semantics was a research program in
theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the n ...
which held that
syntactic structures ''Syntactic Structures'' is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph ...
are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of
transformational generative grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combi ...
in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the
linguistics wars The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doct ...
. Its proponents included
Haj Ross John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was ...
,
Paul Postal Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist. Biography Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. In ...
, James McCawley, and
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...
, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse". Generative semantics is no longer practiced under that name, though many of its central ideas have blossomed in the
cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...
tradition. It is also regarded as a key part of the intellectual heritage of
head-driven phrase structure grammar Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to ...
(HPSG) and
construction grammar Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
, and some of its insights live on in mainstream generative grammar.
Pieter Seuren Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren (born July 9, 1934 in Haarlem, died 6 November 2021) was a Dutch linguist, emeritus professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Inst ...
has developed a semantic syntax which is very close in spirit to the original generative semantics framework, which he played a role in developing.


Interpretive semantics and generative semantics

The controversy surrounding generative semantics stemmed in part from the competition between two fundamentally different approaches to
semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...
within transformational
generative syntax Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
. In the 1960s, work in the generative tradition assumed that semantics was ''interpretive'' in the sense that the meaning of a sentence was computed on the basis of its syntactic structure rather than the other way around. In these approaches, syntactic structures were generated by rules stated in terms of syntactic structure alone, with no reference to meaning. Once generated, these structures would serve as the input to a semantic computation which would output a denotation. This approach captured the relationship between syntactic and semantic patterns, while allowing the syntax to work independently of the semantics, as Chomsky and others had argued for on the basis of empirical observations such as the famous "
colorless green ideas sleep furiously ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'' as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally ...
" sentence. The generative semantics framework took the opposite view, positing that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings. In this approach, meanings were generated directly by the grammar as deep structures, and were subsequently transformed into recognizable sentences by transformations. This approach necessitated more complex underlying structures than those proposed by Chomsky, and thus more complex transformations. Despite this additional complexity, the approach was appealing in several respects. First, it offered a powerful mechanism for explaining synonymity. In his initial work in generative syntax, Chomsky motivated transformations using
active Active may refer to: Music * ''Active'' (album), a 1992 album by Casiopea * Active Records, a record label Ships * ''Active'' (ship), several commercial ships by that name * HMS ''Active'', the name of various ships of the British Royal ...
/
passive Passive may refer to: * Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive * Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works * Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of on ...
pairs such as "I hit John" and "John was hit by me", which have different surface forms despite their identical truth conditions. Generative semanticists wanted to account for ''all'' cases of synonymity in a similar fashion, which proved to be a challenge given the tools available at the time. Second, the theory had a pleasingly intuitive structure: the form of a sentence was quite literally ''derived'' from its meaning via transformations. To some, interpretive semantics seemed rather "clunky" and ''ad hoc'' in comparison. This was especially so before the development of
trace theory In mathematics and computer science, trace theory aims to provide a concrete mathematical underpinning for the study of concurrent computation and process calculi. The underpinning is provided by an abstract algebra, algebraic definition of the fr ...
.


Notes

There is little agreement concerning the question of whose idea generative semantics was. All of the people mentioned here have been credited with its invention (often by each other). Strictly speaking, it was not the fact that active/passive pairs are ''synonymous'' that motivated the passive transformation, but the fact that active and passive verb forms have the same ''selectional requirements''. For example, the agent of the verb ''kick'' (i.e. the thing that's doing the kicking) must be animate whether it is the subject of the active verb (as in "John kicked the ball") or appears in a ''by'' phrase after the passive verb ("The ball was kicked by John").


See also

*
Cognitive revolution The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes. It later became known collectively as cognitive science. The relevant areas of interchange were between th ...
*
Generative linguistics Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
*
Origin of language The origin of language (spoken and signed, as well as language-related technological systems such as writing), its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study th ...
*
Origin of speech The origin of speech refers to the general problem of the origin of language in the context of the physiological development of the human speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and vocal organs used to produce phonological units in all spok ...
*
Minimal recursion semantics Minimal recursion semantics (MRS) is a framework for computational semantics. It can be implemented in typed feature structure formalisms such as head-driven phrase structure grammar and lexical functional grammar. It is suitable for computational ...


References


Bibliography

* Brame, Michael K. (1976). ''Conjectures and refutations in syntax and semantics''. New York: North-Holland Pub. Co. . * Chomsky (1957). ''
Syntactic Structures ''Syntactic Structures'' is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph ...
''. The Hague: Mouton. * Chomsky (1965). ''
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...
''. Cambridge: The MIT Press. * Chomsky (1965). ''Cartesian linguistics''. New York: Harper and Row. * Dougherty, Ray C. (1974). Generative semantics methods: A Bloomfieldian counterrevolution. ''International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics'', ''3'', 255-286. * Dougherty, Ray C. (1975). Reply to the critics on the Bloomfieldian counterrevolution. ''International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics'', ''4'', 249-271. * Fodor, Jerry A.; & Katz, Jerrold J. (Eds.). (1964). ''The structure of language''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. * Harris, Randy Allen. (1995). ''The linguistics wars''. Oxford University Press. . * Huck, Geoffrey J.; & Goldsmith, John A. (1995). ''Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates''. New York: Routledge. * Katz, Jerrold J.; & Fodor, Jerry A. (1964). The structure of a semantic theory. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.) (pp. 479–518). * Katz, Jerrold J.; & Postal, Paul M. (1964). ''An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. * Lakoff, George. (1971). On generative semantics. In D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (Eds.), ''Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology'' (pp. 232–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Lakoff, George. (1976
963 Year 963 ( CMLXIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * March 15 – Emperor Romanos II dies at age 25, probably of poison admini ...

Toward generative semantics
In J. D. McCawley (Ed.) (pp. 43–61). * Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. áj (1976). Is deep structure necessary?. In J. D. McCawley (Ed.), ''Syntax and semantics 7'' (pp. 159–164). * McCawley, James D. (1975). Discussion of Ray C. Dougherty's "Generative semantics methods: A Bloomfieldian counterrevolution". ''International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics'', ''4'', 151-158. * McCawley, James D. (Ed.). (1976a). ''Syntax and semantics 7: Notes from the linguistic underground''. New York: Academic Press. * McCawley, James D. (1976b). ''Grammar and meaning''. New York: Academic Press. * McCawley, James D. (1979). ''Adverbs, vowels, and other objects of wonder''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Postal, Paul M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), ''Goals of linguistic theory''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. * Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Free copy available at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15166. (Published as Ross 1986). * Ross, John R. (1986). ''Infinite syntax!''. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, . * Ross, John R. áj (1970). On declarative sentences. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), ''Readings in English transformational grammar'' (pp. 222–272). Washington: Georgetown University Press. * Ross, John R. áj (1972). Doubl-ing. In J. Kimball (Ed.), ''Syntax and semantics'' (Vol. 1, pp. 157–186). New York: Seminar Press. * Seuren, Pieter A. M. (1974). ''Semantic syntax''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. {{ISBN, 0-19-875028-5. Generative linguistics Grammar frameworks Semantics Syntax